376 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
of student opinion was one of the projects carried out by Adorno together
with the young philosopher Jürgen Habermas, whom he had brought
to the institute in 1956 and who he hoped would not immediately resign
as Dahrendorf had. His fears were groundless, to begin with at least,
since Habermas was attracted by the very sort of theoretical thinking
about society that was pursued by Adorno in the institute. Habermas
had obtained his doctorate in Bonn in 1954 with a dissertation on
Schelling.^39 He had come to Adorno’s notice with a review he had
written in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in July 1953 following
the publication of Heidegger’s notorious lecture of 1935. The passage
the lecture contained about the ‘greatness and inner truth of National
Socialism’ had appeared without change.^40 The essay that Habermas
wrote with the title ‘Dialectics of Rationalization’ and which appeared
in the cultural magazine Merkur in August 1954 also pointed to the
affinity between his way of thinking and Adorno’s. The two men had
met through Adolf Frisé, the culture editor of the Handelsblatt who
had moved from there to Hessen Radio. Habermas had already read
Dialectic of Enlightenment and Prisms, and was familiar with the idio-
syncrasies of Adorno’s philosophical thought. Habermas has a clear
recollection of his first few months in the institute: ‘When I arrived in
Frankfurt, it struck me that Horkheimer and Adorno did not refer
much to contemporary philosophy.... Nor was I ever convinced that
Adorno had read Heidegger closely.... There was something exotic
about this selectivity.... Subjectively, when faced with this very narrow
selection of “permitted” texts, so narrow as to run the risk of being
dogmatic, I felt that I was less constrained in my absorption of philo-
sophical and scientific traditions.’^41 When Habermas came to Frankfurt,
he soon realized that Adorno’s extreme sensitivity was a sign of his
vulnerability. He sat in his institute as if it were a fortress besieged by
his enemies. It was only later on that Habermas’s own contribution to
the defence of critical theory took on the character of philosophical or
epistemological back-up. Initially, he had to set about familiarizing him-
self with the methods of empirical social research so as to be able to
help complete the university study that was already under way. This
empirical project, an in-depth survey of 171 Frankfurt students, sought
to find out about their political activities, their attitudes towards demo-
cracy and their view of society. It was Habermas who was really in
charge of bringing the project to a successful conclusion. However, the
study did not appear in the institute’s own series because Horkheimer
had raised objections to it.^42 His criticisms were directed chiefly at
Habermas’s prefatory theoretical remarks ‘On the Concept of Political
Participation’. In these comments Habermas had argued that the changes
in the function of the university had arisen directly from the way in
which late capitalist society had become permeated by science. The
consequence was that the economy had a direct impact on the system of
knowledge. According to Habermas, this growth in the power of private